Salesforce Spring ’17 Release: What’s in Store for you?

Spring is not just the season of new beginnings, but also the season of Salesforce’s new release! Slated to launch during the first week of February, the latest update has more than 300 new features. The Spring  ’17 release is jam-packed with innovation across the customer success platform. Let’s take a sneak peek into the update:

Service Cloud

With Spring ’17, the customer service experience becomes smarter and increasingly streamlined. Lightning helps agents close cases faster with Lightning console, Knowledge and Case Management. Let’s dive in to know more:

Salesforce LiveMessage

• Makes it easy to engage with customers in personal, two way conversations
• Choice of messaging apps available include SMS, international SMS, and Facebook Messenger
• Lets your support agents respond with complete context and handle multiple conversations at one time

Lightning Experience for Service

• Provides a pre-configured workspace with popular lightning components like lookups and related lists
• Resolve issues quickly by getting the right answers at the right time with Lightning Knowledge
• Three easy walkthroughs for Email, Twitter, and Facebook so users can deliver personal service on the channels their customers prefer

Field Service Lightning iOS Mobile App

• See the details of every job including location, customer information, and even notes from the dispatcher
• Update the status, generate a report and have a customer sign off on the work done with just a few taps
• Work can be done offline and field service lightning syncs the updates when connectivity is restored

Parts, Inventory and Van Stock

• Track inventory levels and availability across company locations
• As jobs are completed, inventory use is automatically logged every time

Omni Channel Supervisor

• Provides actionable analytics in a real-time operational view of workloads across agents
• Live update on the work done and time spent by the agents
• Easily filter, sort, and drill down to see performance on a specific agent

Marketing Cloud

The latest update by Salesforce promises to delight its customers with its new data management platform – Krux. The platform takes online and offline signals about a consumer and ingests, aggregates and makes them available for analysis and targeting. Here is a glimpse of the exciting new features of Marketing Cloud:

Krux Data Management Platform (DMP)

• Krux allows customers to use CRM data, commerce data, website data, mobile data, and IoT data from connected devices to create powerful and actionable consumer segments
• These segments can then be used to create more relevant advertising to personalize websites

Marketing Cloud Connect with Lightning Data Sync

• Gives you the ability to bring in all kinds of data from virtually any source
• Simple to synchronize all your customer data across the entire Salesforce platform

Marketing Cloud Mobile App with Lightning UI

• Available for Android devices on Google Play
• Allows marketers to take action on performances, schedule in-progress and completed emails
• Users can stay informed on deliverability, centre performance, and unengaged subscribers
• Enables users to track automations that are scheduled or completed

Reusable Code Snippets in Email

• Quick and efficient way to use your code to build engaging emails even faster
• Use content builder code snippets for HTML, AM script, and even guide template language

Analytics Cloud

This spring drive business to better heights by gaining actionable insights. With features such as Smart Data Discovery that offer better and deeper insights into your business, the Analytics Cloud is full of exciting new features.

Dataset Designer with Connectors

• Shows you a quick view of recipes, data sets, and replications
• Gives you a quick preview of the data set and allows you to either save it as a new data set or join it with an existing data set
• Set data recipe to run on a schedule so you’re always up-to-date and looking at a fresh data set

Smart Data Discovery

• Allows users to get insights out of your complex data in a jiffy
• Shows charts indicating relationship of different variables to your ideal goal
• Displays these insights directly in the Wave dashboard with easy to understand written explanations

Analytics Home

• All new analytics home screen with pinned apps listed above and notifications listed below
• Allows users to easily pin most used apps

Smart App Wizards

• Makes creating a brand-new sales Wave app easy
• Validates data models before they run

Community Cloud

The Spring ’17 release provides its community cloud users with useful features such as Google Analytics for self-service as well as CPQ and Wave for Lightning Partner Community. Let’s find out more:

Audience Targeting for Pages and Groups

• Personalize pages and groups in your community based on criteria such as a user’s profile, location, or record type
• Select one or more criteria types to create basic to advanced targeting rules
• Easily see who has access to each page or group with a quick at-a-glance summary

Google Analytics for Self-Service

• Track search keywords, discussions, and articles that were most used to deflect cases
• Get deeper insights on page-view traffic by leveraging community dimensions such as user ID, user type, and Salesforce objects

CPQ and Wave for Lightning Partner Community

• With CPQ, partners can create fast and accurate quotes and send customer-ready proposals to prospects in minutes
• Transforms the way partners explore data, find answers, and take action to maximize business performance
• Partners can see a 360-degree view of their business and drill down into the data to identify new opportunities

Personalized Chatter Streams

• Personalized chatter streams allow users to stay organized and up-to-date on the most important conversations on Chatter
• Create personalized feeds for any record, groups, and people to easily follow them in one stream
• Use streams to maximize productivity by getting the most important updates on key deals and accounts in a single place

Direct Messages

• Community managers can have one-on-one or group conversations with members
• Start a message thread directly in the community, from a user’s profile or hover card
• Direct messages now support file attachments, so users can share files easily

Sales Cloud

The Salesforce Spring ’17 update is power-packed with new features for sales professionals. Read on to know more:

Automated Activity Capture

• Eliminate manual data entry and automatically log every email and event
• Saves sales representatives time and effort and also ensures data quality and consistency
• Users can see their customer interactions easily and in one place in Salesforce

Forecasting in Lightning

• Adjust expected pipeline categories and see those numbers roll up the sales hierarchy automatically
• Easily add in commentary to those adjustments so everyone is aware of what to expect
• Allows the entire team to be on the same page

Sales Path

• Help users move faster through the business process by adding path to quotes and custom objects
• Provide guidance such as policy information, handy links, and tips to users at each step
• Highlight key fields, display the steps in a process

Account and Campaign Hierarchies

• Visualize account hierarchy to better understand how accounts are related to each other
• Quickly see how campaigns are organized, and view the individual and aggregated campaign results for every campaign

Want to make the most of the latest Salesforce update?